The Witness Chronicles July 12, 2023

Disintegrating decency in politics, hottest days ever recorded, and Trump’s threats of political violence

This Witness Chronicles replaces issue #65 of The Grasshopper and features three of my recent articles on Medium. These are opinion and observation, my opinions and observations. We’re in turbulent time, both in politics, and in the realization that there is no turning back from climate change- it’s the new normal, like it or not.

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The Disintegration of Decency in American Politics

Specifically, Republican politics

It’s the war of the far right with itself. Marjorie Taylor Greene, conspiracy theorist, called Lauren Boebert, fellow motormouth, a bitch. Then MTG got kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus for being too centrist. There is nothing centrist about the House member who loves to wave firearms around against a background of the Capitol.

Another Freedom Caucus member, Paul Gosar, is overtly racist and has been disowned by his own family because of his extremist views. Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida and presidential wannabe, accuses indicted former President Donald Trump of being soft on gay and trans people.

It needs to be pointed out that these people are all in the same party. And they are symptomatic of a huge problem in US politics, the casting off of any vestige of decency and respect, even within their own party. And the other party is keeping blissfully silent as their opponents tear each other to pieces.

But the Democrats are talking, but about accomplishments, not anger and hatred, the principal subjects of Republican ‘policy’. Biden has been handing out funds from his infrastructure bill to all fifty states, both red and blue. This isn’t imaginary money, it’s a game changer, creating thousands of jobs and dealing with rusting infrastructure ignored by Congress for years.

That’s just a fraction of the things Biden is bringing to the country. In contrast we do not hear about Republican accomplishments other than their crying about trans people, wokeness (whatever that is), and anyone they disagree with. And imaginary witchhunts and scandals.

What are they not talking about? Their actual accomplishments, because they are not popular, including huge tax cuts for the very wealthy and their war on women’s rights with abortion bans. Those topics are off limits, leaving them with exactly zero things they’ve done to benefit their own voters.

I write about this stuff all the time, though I’d rather not. But something is hugely out of balance in our country and it is getting worse. The media focuses on these negative stories about the GOP because they make better copy than a new bridge over the Mississippi that will make the daily lives of thousands better everyday.

Voters have already indicated they are very uncomfortable with all of this stuff the Republicans are doing. Poll after poll shows their policies from going after LGBQT people to severely limiting access to abortions are extremely unpopular, even with many of their own voters.

When asked about the general direction of the country, 70% of all voters think it is wrong and they showed it in the last two elections, wiping out expected Republican big gains in the 2022 midterms and throwing Donald Trump out kicking and screaming in 2020.

You’d think those would be wake up calls for the GOP, but they don’t seem to care what voters actually want or think. A mandate, the indication of support from voters, used to be a major factor in Congress’s decision making. Apparently this is no longer the case which means the party is now beholden to no one, except indicted ex-president Trump.

The logic of this escapes me, but what do I know? Maybe I still believe the people are largely good and don’t want the hatred and division being down on the right. After all, DeSantis has based his campaign on these subjects and it is backfiring against him big time. 

This abandonment of decency by a major party is the tragedy of our time in history. It’s not a minor thing. An example of how important it is is the rise of mass shootings, largely by disaffected angry people who often use these events as very popular public ways of committing suicide while taking strangers with them. There were at least four of these tragedies over the Fourth of July weekend alone.

An atmosphere of decency and respect might have brought these shooters in out of the cold and saved lives. Instead Republican resistance to any changes in gun laws empowers them to kill more fellow Americans. And that’s just one more example of their disregard for their fellow humans unless they are writing checks for the Party.

The recent Fourth of July holiday was supposed to be a time for the American people to celebrate our greatest accomplishment, a declaration of freedom and equality for all. But now we have a party that seems to have disavowed those basic principles of democracy.

It’s hard to know where we go from here.

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We Just Had the Two Hottest Days Ever Recorded on the Planet

It’s accelerating fast, and we are not ready

And this past June was the hottest ever recorded. Axios reports that new measurements for July 3rd and 4th of 2023 were the hottest since we began keeping records and it’s likely that there are more to come.

This data doesn’t just measure surface temps- it covers the entire atmosphere including the southern half of the globe, where it is meteorological winter. The average surface temp was 62.9 F, which may not seem like much but averages don’t always tell the story.

I’m sure this is not news to anyone in the American west and southwest where temperatures have been in the 110 F range for several days. But those high temps are being recorded everywhere, even as skiers are enjoying the slopes in the Sierras in July, skiing in shorts.

In meteorological summer.

I’ve been writing about climate for years but this feels like a tipping point, some kind of corner we are turning into a new more hostile world. 

This didn’t need to happen but that doesn’t matter now. We’re here, not in the past, and we are not prepared.

We’re not prepared because a years long, massive global campaign to keep it that way has been financed by the fossil fuels industry. Another news report from the Guardian this morning details how 1500 oil and gas lobbyists have worked their way into the entire anti-climate change world, as double agents of a sort, spending money for influence that is not to our benefit.

If that sounds insidious, it’s because it is and it has been going on for decades. We’ve basically been screwed so major corporations could make astronomical profits.

But that really doesn’t matter now. The damage, and it is considerable, is done and we have to live with it.

As an observer of all this, I wish I knew what that meant. Because of the efforts of those lobbyists, we are totally unprepared for this. Our electrical grids are flimsy from years of neglect, as energy companies siphoned off profits without investing in the future. We’ve concentrated our populations in regions where resources are scarce and reliance on air conditioning has become normal and even a survival thing.

We are still talking about rebuilding in areas devastated by recurring storms and rising sea levels. The fires in the Canadian northeastern forests cannot be fought because they are so remote and so powerful, feeding on forest filled with flammable underbrush and dead trees killed by insects that have migrated north as temperature warmed.

We didn’t manage them through controlled burns, the way indigenous peoples did for thousands of years. The smoke has reached major population areas at unsafe levels for multiple days in the past few weeks.

There are glimmers of progress in sustainable energy, solar, wind, and yes, nuclear. Growth of the electric vehicle business is exploding. But we’ve barely built the infrastructure to support it.

This goes on and on, as does denial at the highest levels of our government. Even the staunchest deniers are starting to admit that something is very wrong. But it’s a little late for their constituents. It’s no accident that they represent the states that are most vulnerable including Texas, Florida, and the Deep South.

At the moment writing about this seems a bit futile. It’s not the time to be looking backward. The damage is done and escalating. But my crystal ball is blurry when I try to look into the future. That really bothers me and I’m not alone.

But we are in a kind of war and the enemy is incredibly well-funded and organized. They know their business model is on its last legs and they are gathering in as much profit as possible.

It’s called fiddling while Rome burns.

So now, as a human and a writer who records these events, I am faced with a new task, that I share with every other human. Where do we go from here? We can’t reverse things, at least not in anyone’s lifetime.

We live in a new more hostile world of our own making and we have to learn a new life. Sounds overly dramatic, right? Honestly, I think it is an understatement of what this new reality looks like.

I have the luxury of thinking about that, but the thousands who have lost everything to hurricanes, flooding, tornados, and forest fires have much bigger problems than this writer. 

They are your neighbors on the planet and we have to find ways to take care of each other, apocalyptic as that may sound. Next time you read about hundreds of refugees dying trying to escape unlivable conditions, remember, it’s not just a distant problem, it’s our problem.

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When He has Nothing, Trump Threatens People’s Families

Trump has no actual legal defense

Threatening the homes and families of those who oppose you used to be untouchable territory in politics. But that unspoken line was crossed long ago by the former president and his supporters, like many other lines of decency.

He recently posted Barack Obama’s home address in DC and within hours a heavily armed man was arrested nearby seeking a way into the property. This was a seriously fringe actor who apparently lives in a van filled with guns and bomb making material.

These lunatics love Trump to the point of insanity and he is aiming them at the private lives of his accusers, their homes and families. As awful as this tactic is, it tells us just how desperate Trump is getting and how little he has to support his case.

He has literally nothing and he knows it. Ranting and raving and throwing death threats around is not a defense, it’s a sign of being terrified as reality finally enters his world.

First it’s the blame game, a favorite fallback among Republicans these days. When confronted with explaining his terrible polling, GOP contender Ron DeSantis blamed ‘big media’ and the president of Mexico. Don’t ask me how he makes that connection.

Trump grew up in a bubble of inherited privilege and learned to push its limits constantly, insulated by being rich and claims of being successful. Those claims don't hold up when you examine his lifetime return on investment from the estimated $400 million he inherited in his twenties.

Any one of us, investing conservatively, could have turned that amount of money into far more than his actual net worth today, a fact he buries with his exorbitant claims of being a genius businessman and his reputation built on a fake TV show that portrayed him as such.

But that bubble of privilege has burst and he has nothing to protect him from reality. So, he starts an intimidation campaign based on encouraging his more rabid followers to commit crimes against those who are doing their jobs as prosecutors and others he sees as part of the vast conspiracy against him.

There is no vast conspiracy. It’s all of his own making. 

But this tactic has spread through his party and become normal operating procedure for the right. Every time the facts don’t go their way, they open an investigation and allege things they have made up out of whole cloth.

This goes beyond plain lying. That became normal for them years ago. Now they rely on elaborate constructs that go beyond stretching the imagination. The fact that many Americans buy into this crap is a sad statement about where our country is right now.

But it looks like that is gradually changing and there is a thread of decency left that has had it with this stuff. The evidence is that none of these guys, or their investigations and claims are holding water. That’s obvious to most of us, but they seem oblivious to the fact that most of us are not total idiots.

Yes, there are plenty of them, but not nearly enough. Looking at the plummeting ratings of once mighty Fox News after it was revealed that even their loudest mouths never actually believed any of the baloney they’ve been spouting for years.

There are leaks in their story everywhere you look. And voters started noticing long ago. A reminder: Trump lost definitively in 2020 and again in 2022 when his endorsees were roundly defeated over and over.

The lies and blame game are not working, even when they veer into threats of personal violence. Trump knows this and he has no idea how to deal with it. And it appears DeSantis may be realizing that his crazed campaign of hate is not exactly endearing him to voters.

Is this a real change? It looks like it. Claims that Biden is destroying the economy have no basis in reality. In fact the economy is booming, inflation is steeply down, and indicators like car sales are steeply up. The recent jobs numbers are through the roof.

These realities are increasingly obvious even to the most demented. But they have a problem. They have no fallback. They’ve burned their bridges and there is no going back. So they resort to violence and crazy conspiracy theories, but they are not working.

Is it possible that Americans are less crazy than we look? It looks likely.

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My normal Sunday Edition of The Grasshopper will land next weekend. There’s so much going on in the real world and I’m increasingly realizing the need to reconnect with nature, even as it goes through radical changes.

I live in an urban environment though my city is extremely lush and green right now and my neighborhood is full of historic homes, some grandiose mansions built by business titans of the past, now mostly converted to luxury apartments and condos. But we are a city divided by race and economics. Only a mile from here as the crow flies you’d find yourself in fairly extreme poverty with the ever present threat of violence.

Despite our area being liberal and northeastern, there is little interaction between these two worlds and the gap is widening without much hope of bridging it. It pains me to know that not too many of my neighbors seem interested in talking to those whose lives are very different from our own.

This division is thematic to my topical writing and it is widening. Writers are professional communicators and we have a responsibility to try and narrow that gap. Politics and climate are both integral to that division. We need to have dialogs, both written and verbal, to remind ourselves that we have much more in common as humans than any differences.

That’s why the real world is impinging into my writings about the creative lifestyle. Surprisingly that incursion doesn’t seem to scare away subscribers.

Thanks for reading and comments are welcome.

Did you write today?

Martin Edic

2646 words

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